Before I knew there was a word for imagination, I was already making things that weren't there.
There were worlds in my head. People had trouble in them. Things happened, and because those things happened, other things had to happen. I could be occupied with the ordinary business of being a child while, somewhere behind my eyes, an entirely different afternoon was taking place.
The astonishing part was how little I needed. A place could acquire a history because I decided it had one. Something ordinary could become dangerous, or precious, or the last surviving piece of a kingdom. There were no materials to buy. Whatever I could imagine was available, including the things I didn't yet have names for. I had stumbled into the largest workshop I would ever own.
I didn't write these stories down. I was busy. Childhood is a demanding occupation, although its accomplishments are difficult to explain on a résumé. Besides, writing something down seemed like unnecessary paperwork. I already had the story. Why interrupt it to produce evidence?
I didn't understand that a story kept in your head lives under peculiar conditions. You can feel its beauty without finding the words for it. You can overlook its missing pieces because your mind steps across them. Nobody gets confused. Nobody asks why the person introduced so importantly at the beginning has vanished, apparently having found work in a more organized story.
And nobody else can come inside.
For a long time, this arrangement suited me. I had somewhere to go, and nothing I made there could embarrass me.
Then, in 2016, I began writing things down.
I had lost people who were close to me, and I was trying to work through the grief. There were thoughts I needed to do something with - feelings I needed to work through, and words offered somewhere to put them. The page could hold whatever I managed to bring to it, even when I couldn't explain to myself how it all fit together.
The words started flowing. Then they kept flowing.
After so many years of leaving everything unwritten, I had found a reason to stay with the words long enough to see what they could do. I could approach a feeling, turn it around, try another sentence. Sometimes I understood a little more. Sometimes I simply had a more honest account of what I didn't understand.
And somewhere in that process, something surprised me. I was enjoying myself.
That seems an awkward thing to say beside grief. It belongs there anyway. There was pleasure in finding a phrase that felt right, in following a thought further than I had expected, in discovering that I wanted to continue. Sorrow occupied so much of the room that I had almost overlooked this other feeling pulling up a chair.
Writing gave me a way to spend time with what hurt, and an activity I wanted to return to for its own sake. Both things were true. Enjoying the work didn't diminish the people I missed. It gave me something I could do with the life I was still living.
I began to recognize an old interest in this new activity. The child making worlds was still there. Now he was finding out what happens when you write something down and stay to discover the next sentence.
I'll be forty-two this year. Most of my working life has been blue collar as an aircraft mechanic. I have spent a considerable portion of my life building things safe enough to leave the ground, and another portion quietly wondering whether anything I made with words deserved to leave the house. For the last five years, I've worked in an office, which has given my inferiority complex access to a different set of surroundings.
An inferiority complex adapts beautifully. Change its working conditions and it will have the new place inspected before lunch. It can find evidence against you in a conversation, a job title, or somebody else's ease with a word you've only encountered in print. Mine needs very little encouragement.
I can recognize the foolishness of this and still feel it. There are things I know because I have done them, things I understand through years of attention and practice. Yet in the wrong room I can begin to feel that my knowledge belongs to a lower category, as though intelligence were issued according to the cleanliness of your sleeves.
Nobody has to say this to me. I am capable of supplying the entire conversation myself.
I have to watch how readily I accept the little hierarchies I resent. I admire someone else's knowledge, then use it to make my own look smaller. Soon I am trying to disguise the route by which I arrived. Yet the route is where my experience comes from. If I sand away everything that seems insufficiently refined, I may remove the very details I have to offer.
The imaginary conversation about writing is worse. In that one, someone discovers that I haven't been much of a reader throughout my life. Not relative to many of my friends anyway. I feel like someone who has wandered into the literary profession through an unsecured maintenance entrance.
I was never the child reading beneath the covers with a flashlight. I haven't become a prodigious reader as an adult, either. I can't honestly give myself that history, however useful it would be to the story of how I became a writer.
So I call myself unlikely. Sometimes I call myself reluctant. These descriptions contain some truth, and both offer a convenient place to hide.
If I am sufficiently unlikely, perhaps nobody can expect much. If I remain reluctant, perhaps I can keep writing privately without ever having to stand beside the work in public. I can discuss the difficulties of being seen while the years continue their entirely inconsiderate habit of passing.
There is work to do about the reading. Books contain things I need to learn: how a scene carries its weight, how a sentence changes speed, how a writer makes room for a feeling without explaining it to death. Wanting to write gives me a reason to pay closer attention to them now.
It would be easy to turn that need into another prohibition. First, read everything. Then, once the accumulated literature of humanity has been dealt with, attempt a paragraph.
I can read and write while I am still learning. I can admit what I haven't done without treating the admission as a permanent verdict. Years of imagining haven't taught me everything about prose. They have, however, left me with something I want to put into it.
David Brin's advice to new writers makes room for a life beyond literature. He sees value in learning another profession and acquiring experience of the world. He also takes the work of writing seriously: its skills, its weaknesses, its need for criticism. I find the combination reassuring. My life gives me material, and I will have to learn what to do with it.
An aircraft mechanic has reasons to pay attention. Small details matter. Assumptions require checking. Something can appear perfectly satisfactory while concealing a problem that will become considerably less private later.
I wouldn't pretend that this makes me an accomplished writer of course. A set of aircraft specifications and a short story have different obligations, and transferring every habit from one to the other would produce some very odd fiction. The hero would spend three pages locating the applicable procedure. The dragon would be grounded pending inspection.
But the habit of looking closely can travel. So can patience with a problem. So can the willingness to discover that the thing you were certain about is the thing you need to examine again.
There is another habit I may need to reconsider. Much practical work fulfills its purpose by becoming invisible. When everything works, people go about their lives without imagining the attention that made their ordinary day possible. I respect that kind of work. I also wonder whether I have become so comfortable being useful in the background that asking someone to look at something of mine feels indecent. A story needs to be noticed. I have to let it take up some space.
There is also the ordinary day-to-day work of being human. A person may know exactly what to do with their hands and have no idea what to say when someone asks how they are. A joke may be carrying more than the people laughing at it realize. Someone can be proud, generous, jealous, frightened, and tired within the same twenty minutes.
These people don't become interesting only when a writer gives them a more literary occupation. Their lives already contain the difficult business of being human. I have been living among them. I am one of them.
When I wonder where inspiration comes from, I suspect I have sometimes been asking where the impressive inspiration comes from. The sort that would make a good answer in an interview. A revelation. A journey. An encounter whose significance everyone involved understood immediately.
Meanwhile, a small, awkward moment goes by unnoticed. Someone begins to say something and decides against it. A familiar place looks different because the person who made it familiar is absent. An object survives its usefulness and acquires another kind of importance.
Any of these might hold a story. I have to become curious enough to stay with it and follow the questions it raises. If I follow them far enough, I may find someone whose reasons matter to me. Then I have to make those reasons matter to a reader.
This is the work hidden inside the phrase creating something from nothing. There is a great deal in the supposed nothing: work, embarrassment, overheard speech, love, things kept, things lost, all the details that looked unimportant when they happened. Imagination brings some of them together. Writing makes me find out whether they belong together.
Even the words arrive with histories. People were using them long before I came along, asking for dinner, promising to return, explaining something badly, trying to be forgiven. I get to arrange those worn, familiar things until they carry a feeling I couldn't otherwise give away. It seems an improbable use of language, which also has to cope with warranty exclusions. Somehow, I’ve found there is room for both.
In an essay by Sally Kerrigan called “Writing Is Thinking,” the practical act of getting ideas onto a page becomes a way of understanding them. The mess comes first. Clarity takes work. I am relieved by this account because it allows the page to be useful before it is impressive.
In my head, an idea can remain wonderfully complete for years. Put it into words and I begin finding the questions it has been avoiding. What actually happened? Why does this matter? Who is speaking? Have I described something a person could recognize, or have I merely announced that it was profound?
Sometimes the first honest sentence is embarrassingly plain. I miss someone. I am afraid of looking foolish. I want to make something that lasts. There may be a more beautiful way to say it eventually, but I need to know what I am trying to say before I begin decorating it.
This is where my old reluctance can become very busy. It wants the first attempt to demonstrate that I was right to attempt anything. It wants proof of talent before allowing practice. Given its way, it would cancel the first lesson because the student had arrived without already knowing the material.
A bad paragraph gives me something to work on. I can see where the thought wanders away. I can remove a sentence, move another, try again. The magnificent unwritten paragraph has never offered me these conveniences. It sits in my head, enjoying a reputation it has done very little to earn.
Eventually I will have to listen to what I have written. That seems especially useful to someone like me, who has heard far more conversation than he has studied on the page. I can ask whether these words sound like something a person means.
I can also listen for the places where I have dressed the prose up to conceal my discomfort. There is a particular temptation, when you feel underqualified, to use every impressive word available. I know the urge. I want to look as though I belong. But a reader has come for a story, and I am making them wait while I adjust my credentials.
Humor can help me loosen that grip. I have considered how comedy seems to gives serious writing room to breathe. I appreciate a laugh that lets a person keep their dignity while admitting how ridiculous the situation has become. I especially appreciate it when that person is me.
I have managed, for example, to be embarrassed about an ambition that mostly requires sitting quietly in a room. There are people doing considerably more alarming things with their weekends and reporting them confidently on social media.
Still, beneath the absurdity is a fear I know well.
I want people to like what I make. I want them to see something worthwhile in it. There have been times when I have wanted their approval so badly that I have let it decide what I thought of myself. A response could lift me or diminish me far beyond anything it reasonably said about the work in question.
Knowing this about myself makes sharing difficult. I can imagine the whole unpleasant sequence before I have sent anything: the silence, the polite answer, the enthusiasm that seems slightly forced. I can cross-examine a compliment until it regrets ever having come forward.
What frightens me most is being seen to have tried. People would know I wanted to make something moving or beautiful. They would see the distance between the thing I hoped for and the thing I managed. Keeping it private lets me keep that distance private, too.
The fear can get into the writing long before anyone reads it. I imagine a particular person's raised eyebrow and begin removing whatever might provoke it. Out goes the tender part. Out goes the strange part. The joke seems risky; better lose that, too. Eventually I have produced something so well protected that there is very little left to meet. Then I wonder why it feels lifeless.
I would like to find out what I sound like before this imaginary person begins editing. There may be things in that voice I will change with good reason. I want to hear them first.
Rhonda Browning White's “Six Things You Need to Know about Your Writer” finds humor in a writer's conflicting needs: withdrawal and company, absorption and connection. I recognize something in the wish to disappear into a world and then return with something to give the people outside it. I want the privacy of making and the companionship of being understood.
The difficulty is that other people get to take part in the second half. They bring their own attention, taste, experience, and mood. Once I let someone read, I lose control of what the writing will mean to them. Even a generous reader may come back with something I didn't expect.
That uncertainty is part of what I want. I would like another mind to meet mine somewhere in these sentences. It is also the part I am tempted to prevent.
I need a better way of hearing criticism than the one that turns every comment into a judgment of my whole existence. If someone loses interest in a scene, I need to be able to ask where. If they misunderstand something, I need enough steadiness to examine what I actually put on the page.
Brin emphasizes the usefulness of readers who can show a writer where the work fails to reach them. He also distinguishes identifying a problem from prescribing its solution. I can take a reader's difficulty seriously and still think for myself about how to address it.
Perhaps several people stumble in the same place. I should look closely there. Perhaps someone wants an entirely different kind of story. I can recognize that, too. I will need judgment as well as humility, and both will improve if I give them something real to work with.
I have spent years learning to examine work without making every necessary correction an existential emergency. I would like to bring some of that ability to a page. There can be a problem in something I made. I can care enough to fix it. I can remain a person worth knowing during the repair.
I expect this will be easier to write than to remember when the moment comes.
The moment may also bring very little response at all. So what about the silence that can meet work a writer cares deeply about? There must be reasons to continue in purpose, in a life beyond writing, and in the individual people a piece may reach.
I can remember a reason of my own. In 2016, writing was already doing something for me before anybody else had an opinion about it. I had somewhere to work out my feelings. I discovered something I enjoyed. I would like to keep those beginnings within reach when I am tempted to measure the whole activity by its reception.
I need the part about having a life. If I put all my worth into being a writer, I will have recreated an old problem under a more flattering name. I want writing to give me another way to live and pay attention. I want room around it for people, ordinary pleasures, responsibilities, and days when nothing publishable happens.
I also need to let a quiet response remain a quiet response. Someone may be busy. They may mean to read later. They may read and have little to say. They may dislike it. These possibilities are difficult enough without my arranging them into a unanimous declaration about my value.
Writing can wait in ways a conversation can't. A page may sit unread while somebody works, sleeps, forgets about it, remembers. Months later, its first sentence is still there, prepared to begin. I like that small patience. The person I hope to reach doesn't have to be ready at the instant I find the courage to speak.
And perhaps someone will recognize something. A feeling they haven't managed to explain. A person they miss. Some small embarrassment they thought belonged to them alone. I can't require that recognition, or guarantee it by working hard. I can make room for it by letting the work be read.
I think about the boy who didn't bother writing his worlds down. He wasn't calculating an audience.
There is something I want to recover from him, though I can't recover his circumstances. I have a living to make and things to learn. I know enough now to recognize weaknesses he would have sailed past. But I would like a little of his willingness to become absorbed before asking whether the activity justified him.
At forty-two, or close enough to hear it approaching, I can feel the pressure to explain what I have to show for my time. It is easy to inventory everything I haven't done. The books I haven't read. The stories I didn't record. The years during which I might have been getting better.
Those years held a life. I worked. I learned things. And for the last decade, I have been writing. I should remember to include that in the inventory. I have already begun; I have already found something worth continuing. Regret tends to overlook accomplishments that interfere with its argument.
I can move forward with a manageable act. Finish one piece. Give it the attention I know how to give, and learn enough to give it more. Read it aloud. Let someone see it. Listen to what they say. Let the rest of my life continue existing.
There are things I will write badly. There are things I may learn to write well. I am curious about what might happen if I spend less time trying to settle the question in advance.
For so many years, the stories could only happen where I was. They went to work with me, waited through the practical business of the day, and disappeared whenever I forgot them. Putting them into words gives them somewhere else to exist. Another person can find them there.
I imagine handing over a page and resisting the urge to explain myself. There’s a moment when the reader looks down and I have to wait. I will probably find something unnecessary to do with my hands.
Then they will begin reading.
Something I once had to keep imagining will be happening in somebody else's mind.
I am still the unlikely writer. I still have plenty to learn, and I expect I will continue making a remarkably thorough job of worrying. But I have something to show for the time I've spent here, and I would like to stop holding it behind my back.
I made this. I'd like you to read it.
